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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

For those of you who haven't heard, Baby Lisa has been missing for two weeks now. Now that I have children of my own, I can't watch news stories about these things anymore, so my source of information has mostly been people recounting a tiny bit of what's going on here and there. In other words, I don't know much.

What I do know is that she is gone. Regardless of how or why or who took her, the point is she's gone. I have insane fears about something happening to our girls. I think all parents do to a certain extent. With the recent abduction of Baby Lisa, it's been on my mind more than usual. Coupled with the fact that I was re-reading David Baldacci's Hour Game and had serial killers on my mind, I've been having crazy nightmares. I don't think it helped that I was sick with a fever the last three days.

It's a fine line to walk in today's world between being safely cautious and paranoid. It's hard enough to negotiate that field as a single woman. But adding kids to the equation makes it almost impossible. I try to remember not to worry, and pray for peace and protection, but sometimes my mind works itself into a frenzy.

I think it's interesting to see how people react to situations, too. I know what I think I would do when you ask me how I would respond to a carjacker or mugger or kidnapper. But were any of those things to happen in real life, would my reaction be the same? I hope I never get to find out.

Two of my friends have had terrible experiences in which they didn't respond the way they thought they would. One was leaving a concert late at night and was carjacked by a 14-year-old who put a gun in her face. Instead of giving him the car, she told him she'd take him where he wanted to go but he wasn't getting her car. I could NOT believe she did that. She couldn't either. She said she thought it was because he was just a little kid and she wasn't intimidated by him.

Another was mugged in the parking lot of a restaurant in broad daylight. She had stopped there with her 7 and 5 year old kids on their drive from Kansas to Oklahoma. A couple of guys tried to steal her purse. She held onto it for dear life, kicking and cursing as they dragged her along the pavement. They finally gave up and left her and the kids unharmed, but shaken. She was operating on Mama Bear instinct though; her fear was if they got her whole purse, they would know their names and address and could come find them. I don't know that I would have had the presence of mind to think of that in the moment.

What about you? Have you ever experienced a nightmare that became a reality? If so, how did you react?